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Christopher Marshburn & Eric Knowles
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
Discussing racial issues often makes Whites anxious, particularly when their conversation partners are Black. We theorized that Whites seek to avoid anxiety by suppressing thoughts of White identity prior to such interactions. In Study 1, White participants expected to discuss a race-related or nonracial topic with a Black or White partner. An Implicit Association Test (IAT) measured subsequent changes in the activation of participants' White identities (i.e., self-White associations). The prospect of discussing race-related (vs. nonracial) topics with a Black partner reduced participants' self-White associations, implying identity suppression. Moreover, participants' nonverbal responses suggest that identity suppression functioned to mute participants' anxiety. In Study 2, participants completed the identity activation measure only after learning that they would not interact with a partner. Consistent with "rebound" effects known to follow suppression, participants who previously expected to discuss a race-related topic with a Black partner showed heightened self-White associations.
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Discrimination with Incomplete Information in the Sharing Economy: Field Evidence from Airbnb
Ruomeng Cui, Jun Li & Dennis Zhang
Indiana University Working Paper, December 2016
Abstract:
Recent research has found widespread discrimination by hosts against guests of certain races in online marketplaces, which endangers the very basis of a sharing economy - building trust in the communities. In this paper, we explore the root cause of discrimination and how to eliminate discrimination. We conducted two randomized field experiments among 1,256 hosts on Airbnb by creating fictitious guest accounts and sending accommodation requests to them. We find that requests from guests with distinctively African American names are 19 percentage points less likely to be accepted than those with distinctively White names. However, a public review posted on a guest's page mitigates discrimination: when guest accounts receive a positive review, the acceptance rates of guest accounts with distinctively White and African American names are statistically indistinguishable. We further demonstrate that a negative review also eliminates discrimination. Our finding is consistent with statistical discrimination: when lacking perfect information, hosts infer the quality of a guest by race and make rental decisions based on the average predicted quality of each racial group; when enough information is shared, hosts do not need to infer guests' quality from their race, and discrimination is eliminated. Our results offer direct and clear guidance for sharing-economy platforms on how to reduce discrimination. Platform owners should motivate users to write reviews of one another and design a better mechanism to facilitate information sharing - especially information that signals guest quality.
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Backlash: The Politics and Real-World Consequences of Minority Group Dehumanization
Nour Kteily & Emile Bruneau
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, January 2017, Pages 87-104
Abstract:
Research suggests that members of advantaged groups who feel dehumanized by other groups respond aggressively. But little is known about how meta-dehumanization affects disadvantaged minority group members, historically the primary targets of dehumanization. We examine this important question in the context of the 2016 U.S. Republican Primaries, which have witnessed the widespread derogation and dehumanization of Mexican immigrants and Muslims. Two initial studies document that Americans blatantly dehumanize Mexican immigrants and Muslims; this dehumanization uniquely predicts support for aggressive policies proposed by Republican nominees, and dehumanization is highly associated with supporting Republican candidates (especially Donald Trump). Two further studies show that, in this climate, Latinos and Muslims in the United States feel heavily dehumanized, which predicts hostile responses including support for violent versus non-violent collective action and unwillingness to assist counterterrorism efforts. Our results extend theorizing on dehumanization, and suggest that it may have cyclical and self-fulfilling consequences.
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An outgroup advantage in discriminating between genuine and posed smiles
Steven Young
Self and Identity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Ingroup memberships are an important component of the self-concept and people favor their ingroups on a variety of evaluative and behavioral dimensions. Recent research has extended these ingroup favoritism effects to face processing, including an ingroup advantage in emotion identification. The current research was designed to extend these past demonstrations of ingroup favoring biases in face processing to a novel domain: discriminating between genuine and posed smiles. However, across two experiments an unexpected finding emerged: perceivers were better at discriminating between real/fake smiles displayed by outgroup than ingroup members. Experiment 2 also finds that participants are not only more accurate, but also faster to make real/fake judgments for outgroup than ingroup targets. Explanations for these unexpected findings are discussed.
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Show your pride? The surprising effect of race on how people perceive a pride display
Toni Schmader, Jason Martens & Jason Lawrence
Self and Identity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Non-verbal expressions of pride convey status. But pride displays can be interpreted as either authentic or hubristic. Given negative stereotypes about Blacks, we hypothesized that when displaying pride, Blacks would be rated higher in hubristic and lower in authentic pride compared to Whites. Contrary to predictions, three experiments found consistent evidence that Whites are judged to be more hubristic than Blacks when displaying pride. This effect occurred when pride was displayed in an unspecified (Study 1), academic (Study 2), or work-related context (Study 3). Effects were largely specific to pride displays and not a function of a general race-based response bias. We speculate that these counterintuitive findings might reflect a negative reaction to those with high status flaunting their success.
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Miriam Taschler & Keon West
Sex Roles, forthcoming
Abstract:
Intergroup contact - (positive) interactions with people from different social groups - is a widely researched and strongly supported prejudice-reducing mechanism shown to reduce prejudice against a wide variety of outgroups. However, no known previous research has investigated whether intergroup contact can also reduce sexism against women. Sexism has an array of negative outcomes. One of the most detrimental and violent ones is rape, which is both justified and downplayed by rape myth acceptance. We hypothesised that more frequent, higher quality contact with counter-stereotypical women would predict lower levels of sexism and thus less rape myth acceptance (in men) and less sexualised projected responses to rape (in women). Two studies using online surveys with community samples supported these hypotheses. In Study 1, 170 male participants who experienced more positive contact with counter-stereotypical women reported less intention to rape. Similarly, in Study 2, 280 female participants who experienced more positive contact with counter-stereotypical women reported less projected sexual arousal at the thought of being raped. Thus, the present research is the first known to show that contact could be a potential tool to combat sexism, rape myth acceptance, intentions to rape in men, and sexualisation of rape by women.
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Stephanie Vezich, Benjamin Gunter & Matthew Lieberman
Journal of Consumer Behaviour, forthcoming
Abstract:
Women tend to be portrayed in a sexualized or domestic manner in mainstream advertising; importantly this trend holds not only for ads targeting men but also for those targeting women themselves. Such a focus on sexualized portrayals in particular may not seem strategic given a wealth of evidence suggesting that women evaluate these portrayals quite negatively. Consumer attitudes toward domestic portrayals are more mixed but, unsurprisingly, vary according to how much a woman identifies as traditional. If female consumers do not evaluate these common portrayals positively, why might they persist? Past work suggests a disconnect between reported attitudes toward general visual sexual stimuli and physiological and neural responses; therefore, it is plausible that neural responses to stereotypical female portrayals in advertising may be at odds with reported attitudes and may have a bigger impact on consumer behavior. The current study exposed women to sexualized, domestic, and control images in a functional magnetic resonance imaging scanner as an initial test of this idea. We found that participants reported liking both domestic and control images more than sexualized images. In contrast, they showed more activity in regions associated with reward and arousal (ventral striatum and amygdala, respectively) while viewing sexualized images relative to both control and domestic images. Surprisingly, ventral striatum response to sexualized ads was stronger for women who endorsed traditional attitudes than those who reported less traditional attitudes. These results suggest that despite reporting negative attitudes toward sexualized portrayals, women may in fact have a favorable response to these images.
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Cardiac afferent activity modulates the expression of racial stereotypes
Ruben Azevedo et al.
Nature Communications, January 2017
Abstract:
Negative racial stereotypes tend to associate Black people with threat. This often leads to the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons held by a Black individual. Yet, little is known about how bodily states impact the expression of racial stereotyping. By tapping into the phasic activation of arterial baroreceptors, known to be associated with changes in the neural processing of fearful stimuli, we show activation of race-threat stereotypes synchronized with the cardiovascular cycle. Across two established tasks, stimuli depicting Black or White individuals were presented to coincide with either the cardiac systole or diastole. Results show increased race-driven misidentification of weapons during systole, when baroreceptor afferent firing is maximal, relative to diastole. Importantly, a third study examining the positive Black-athletic stereotypical association fails to demonstrate similar modulations by cardiac cycle. We identify a body-brain interaction wherein interoceptive cues can modulate threat appraisal and racially biased behaviour in context-dependent ways.
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Pum Kommattam, Kai Jonas & Agneta Fischer
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Embarrassment displays show others that one is aware of one's own misbehavior and willing to make up for it. The facial actions of embarrassment, however, are partly similar to those of disinterest, which has an opposite function, signaling that one is not concerned about one's self in relation to others. In the context of negative intergroup relations, embarrassment displays of outgroup members may therefore be misinterpreted as disinterest. In the present research, the authors predicted that Whites would perceive Arab expressions of embarrassment more as disinterest, but embarrassment displays of Whites more as embarrassment. Aggregated Study 1 (N = 1,154) confirms this hypothesis showing that White participants perceived more intense embarrassment in Whites than in Arabs and more intense disinterest in Arabs than in Whites. Studies 2 (n = 193) and 3 (n = 260) include methodological improvements and either largely or fully replicated our findings. Based on this evidence in an Arab-White context, the authors conclude that the affiliative function of embarrassment perception is dependent on the nature of the group context. Finally, they discuss the generalizability of this intergroup emotion bias in which emotional expressions may be perceived as the opposite of what they are intended to display.
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Entertainment-education effectively reduces prejudice
Sohad Murrar & Markus Brauer
Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, forthcoming
Abstract:
We show that entertainment-education reduces prejudice and does so more effectively than several established prejudice reduction methods. In Experiment 1, participants exposed to an educational television sitcom with diverse, yet relatable Arab/Muslim characters had lower scores on implicit and explicit measures of prejudice than participants exposed to a control sitcom featuring an all White cast. The prejudice reduction effect persisted 4 weeks after exposure. In Experiment 2, viewing of a 4-minute music video that portrayed Arabs/Muslims as relatable and likable resulted in a larger reduction in prejudice against Arabs/Muslims than two established prejudice reduction methods (imagined contact exercise and group malleability article), which produced no improvements. In both experiments, increased identification with target group members was associated with greater prejudice reduction. Entertainment-education, in addition to being scalable, is likely to be one the most effective methods for improving intergroup relations and promoting diversity.
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Wan-Ju Iris Franz
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, February 2017, Pages 336-355
Abstract:
This paper examines the size charts of 54 American apparel retailers. Evidence reveals that sizes are inflated for women's apparel brands with moderately higher prices. Very expensive designer brands measure significantly smaller than lower priced brands for women's apparel. Brands that target young adult female consumers measure significantly smaller than their counterparts that target relatively older consumers. Evidence indicates little, if any, vanity sizing in men's or children's apparel.
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Robust Social Categorization Emerges From Learning the Identities of Very Few Faces
Robin Kramer et al.
Psychological Review, forthcoming
Abstract:
Viewers are highly accurate at recognizing sex and race from faces - though it remains unclear how this is achieved. Recognition of familiar faces is also highly accurate across a very large range of viewing conditions, despite the difficulty of the problem. Here we show that computation of sex and race can emerge incidentally from a system designed to compute identity. We emphasize the role of multiple encounters with a small number of people, which we take to underlie human face learning. We use highly variable everyday 'ambient' images of a few people to train a Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) model on identity. The resulting model has human-like properties, including a facility to cohere previously unseen ambient images of familiar (trained) people - an ability which breaks down for the faces of unknown (untrained) people. The first dimension created by the identity-trained LDA classifies both familiar and unfamiliar faces by sex, and the second dimension classifies faces by race - even though neither of these categories was explicitly coded at learning. By varying the numbers and types of face identities on which a further series of LDA models were trained, we show that this incidental learning of sex and race reflects covariation between these social categories and face identity, and that a remarkably small number of identities need be learnt before such incidental dimensions emerge. The task of learning to recognize familiar faces is sufficient to create certain salient social categories.
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A minimal ingroup advantage in emotion identification confidence
Steven Young & John Paul Wilson
Cognition and Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
Emotion expressions convey valuable information about others' internal states and likely behaviours. Accurately identifying expressions is critical for social interactions, but so is perceiver confidence when decoding expressions. Even if a perceiver correctly labels an expression, uncertainty may impair appropriate behavioural responses and create uncomfortable interactions. Past research has found that perceivers report greater confidence when identifying emotions displayed by cultural ingroup members, an effect attributed to greater perceptual skill and familiarity with own-culture than other-culture faces. However, the current research presents novel evidence for an ingroup advantage in emotion decoding confidence across arbitrary group boundaries that hold culture constant. In two experiments using different stimulus sets participants not only labeled minimal ingroup expressions more accurately, but did so with greater confidence. These results offer novel evidence that ingroup advantages in emotion decoding confidence stem partly from social-cognitive processes.
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The implicit power motive in intergroup dialogues about the history of slavery
Ruth Ditlmann et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, January 2017, Pages 116-135
Abstract:
This research demonstrates that individual differences in the implicit power motive (i.e., the concern with impact, influence, and control) moderate how African Americans communicate with White Americans in challenging intergroup dialogues. In a study with African American participants we find that the higher their implicit power motive, the more they use an affiliation strategy to communicate with a White American partner in a conversation context that evokes the history of slavery (Study 1). In a study with White American participants we find that, in the same conversation context, they are more engaged (i.e., open, attentive, and motivated) if they receive an affiliation message rather than a no-affiliation message from an African American partner (Study 2). In interracial dyads we find that African American participants' implicit power motives moderate how much they intend to signal warmth to a White American discussion partner, how much they display immediacy behaviors and use affiliation imagery in the discussion, and with what level of engagement White American participants respond (Study 3). High but not low implicit power African Americans thus employ a communication strategy - expressing affiliation and warmth - that can be effective for engaging White Americans with uncomfortable, race-identity-relevant topics.